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Lady Killer

In a world of gossip girls, it is perhaps refreshing to have a teenage heroine who cuts off all her hair because it gets in her way; and Kristin Cashore’s eccentric and absorbing first novel, “Graceling,” has such a heroine. Katsa is tough, awkward, beautiful and consumed by pressing moral issues. She is extremely serious; it could be said she lacks a sense of humor.

The story is set in a rich fantasy world where children born with extreme talents, called Graces, are “Gracelings.” These Grace­lings occupy a vexed and complicated place in their kingdoms, as they are both shunned and respected by ordinary people and exploited by kings. Katsa’s Grace happens to be murder.

She can kill a man with her bare hands. This peculiar talent is discovered when, as an 8-year-old, she accidentally kills a distant cousin who is leering at women servants and touching them. Her uncle, the king, recognizes the potential of Katsa’s power and begins to train her. He turns his niece into his creature, his own private girl assassin, forcing her to do the dirty work of the court: wreaking vengeance on his enemies, subduing those who dare to defy him. As one might expect, the adult world in “Graceling” is irrational, whimsical, cruel — the young people band together into a secret Council, which Katsa dreams up to protect the innocent and correct the sins of narcissistic kings.

Katsa comes from the tradition of heroines like Pippi Longstocking, who scandalize the adult world with impossible feats of physical strength like lifting a horse or fighting a pirate. Katsa gets into a brawl with a mountain lion and wins. She subdues an entire army of guards. In other words, she overturns every biological reality and cultural stereotype of feminine weakness, which is a large part of her charm. She is the girl’s dream of female power unloosed.

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In SWORDS, by Ben Boos (Candlewick Press, $24.99), exemplars of the smithys art are depicted close to life-size, from blades hardy folk used against bandits and beasts to imperial weapons thought to have had latent spirits of their own. Included are entries about the medieval mercenaries, warriors, chieftains  and not a few fierce war maidens  who wielded them.  J. Patrick Lewis

On one of her secret missions, Katsa encounters another Grace­ling, Prince Po, who can read minds. He also happens to be extremely handsome. After a great deal of wrang­ling, Katsa finally frees herself from her tyrannical uncle, and together she and Po try to save his young cousin Princess Bitterblue from her pathologically insane father, King Leck, who is in possession of a dangerous and bewildering Grace. Many harrowing adventures ensue.

There is a touching ordinariness to these characters as they go about their work breaking arms and legs. Unable to fall asleep one night, Katsa “listened to make sure no one woke. Normal. She wasn’t normal.” As in every self-respecting fantasy story, all the good characters, the ones we’re supposed to like, are freaks and outcasts. Po admits: “I do a decent job of folding myself into normal society, when I must. But it’s an act, Katsa; it’s always an act. . . . When I’m in my father’s city there’s a part of me that’s simply waiting until I can travel again. Or return to my own castle, where I’m left alone.”

In the course of her dark and eventful tale, Cashore plays with the idea of awkwardness, how at a certain age gifts and talents are burdens, how they make it impossible to feel comfortable in the world. And in this she writes a fairly realistic portrait of teenage life into the baroque courts of her outlandish kingdoms.

There is also embedded in this adventure a tempestuous love story; it begins with the two Gracelings fighting, and the anger that flows between them is as interesting as the attraction. They train together, as both are gifted in physical combat. And somehow in all of this struggle and resistance Cashore offers an acute portrayal of sexual awakening: ambivalent, rageful, exhilarating, wistful in turns.

At one point Katsa thinks of herself as a “vicious beast that struck out at friends in uncontrollable anger.” In many respects “Grace­ling” is a study of mysterious angers: it offers a perfect parable of adolescence, as its characters struggle with turbulent emotions they must learn to control. The consequences are more tangible than they usually are in more mundane settings — if Katsa loses control, she breaks someone’s jaw by accident — but the principle is the same. The teenage characters in this novel, like some we may know in life, grow into their graces. They realize that their monstrous individuality is not so monstrous after all.

GRACELING

By Kristin Cashore

471 pp. Harcourt. $17. (Ages 14 and up)

Katie Roiphe teaches in the Cultural Reporting and Criticism program at New York University and is the author of “Uncommon Arrangements: Seven Marriages.”

A version of this review appears in print on , on Page BR33 of the Sunday Book Review with the headline: Lady Killer. Today's Paper|Subscribe